Exploring art in its many incarnations

Day: April 25, 2015

A while ago, I was really into encaustic paintings. For those of you who have never heard of encaustic painting, it’s a really old form of wax painting dating back to around 100 A.D. Typically, beeswax is blended with resin to form a medium to which pigment is added. The whole thing needs to be heated and applied onto suitable substrates and fused together to form a good bond. I don’t want to go into details as there are different formulas, techniques and so on (you can always google it).

The above piece is the first encaustic painting that I made. Without proper wax on hand, I used regular paraffin wax. It looks ok but you can really see the difference in that the wax is more crystalline and the texture is slightly tacky, even after a few years.

Since I am interested in many different mediums, talking about encaustic now allows me make a gentle segue into the rekindling of my interest in encaustics lately. Encaustic paintings are beautiful in their vast array of texture and translucency. They are usually buffed to a beautiful sheen and layers are visible underneath. This is the reason I originally fell in love with them. Expect more waxy things to come…